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Study led by Duke-NUS researcher among the top global emergency medicine articles of 2021

Duke-NUS scientists continue to shape global thought leadership in emergency medicine—this time, with the recent selection of a 2021 research paper for inclusion in a compilation of high-quality emergency medicine articles from that year by the Global Emergency Medicine Literature Review Group¹.

The paper on increasing out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) survival rates², led by Professor Marcus Ong from Duke-NUS’ Health Services and Systems Research Programme and first published in the journal Resuscitation, was selected from an initial pool of more than 44,000 articles as one of only 23 articles that met the Review Group’s stringent criteria for clarity, study design, global importance and relevance as well as the likely impact on the global practice of emergency medicine. 

“Unlike other diseases where only healthcare workers can play a significant role in treating patients, OHCA is a unique condition that requires partnership between the community, pre-hospital emergency care workers and hospital providers to ‘treat’ these patients,” said Prof Ong. “By developing a low-cost telephone CPR programme, our study demonstrated that the public can learn how to work with emergency healthcare workers in saving the lives of OHCA patients even in low resource settings.”

Each year, the Review Group, which presented its first such synthesis in 2005, highlights high-quality emergency medicine research in the areas of emergency medicine development, disaster and humanitarian response and emergency care in resource-limited settings to illustrate best practices, help stimulate further research and further professionalise the field. 

Professor Patrick Casey, Senior Vice-Dean for Research at Duke-NUS, commented, “Marcus has been tenacious in his efforts to improve the survival rates for people who suffer a cardiac arrest outside of the hospital—efforts for which he also received the National Outstanding Clinician-Scientist award earlier this year. I am proud that Duke-NUS can attract and develop researchers like Marcus whose work serves as a reference and inspiration for clinicians, researchers and policymakers in Singapore and across the globe.”